How tokien ruined modern fantasy

[Gez]

By this reasonning, he also did make the goliath, the tabaxi, the kobold, the aasimar, the tiefling, the genasi, the lizardman, the gnoll, the darkcreeper, the beholder, the illithid, the skum, and the sphinx suck by not including them. Moron.

If you want to blame people for "making gnome suck", lay the blame squarely where it should be: Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman. DragonLance is where it was once and for all decided that all short races are annoying "comic relief."

 

[Scarbonac]

It's me again the 16 year old target of tolkien fanboy hate. He did make gnomes suck by not including them so people over look them a so comical because of the whole lawn ornement thing.

That's just deranged. He's at fault because he didn't actually use them...?

I also have read fafhrd and grey mouser and I have no problem with that its just with tolkien as you can see people worship him as a god and his word is law. So when someone challenges this they call me a troll and I may be a troll but I am a troll with a message expand your herizons Tolkien fanboys read Conan, Dracula, Frankenstein or anything by H.P. Lovecraft and step out of your world and into a new like the realms of horror explored in many of the books I mentioned.

I'm willing to lay odds that most of us have read all of those authors, plus manymany more. What about Burroughs? Gardner Fox? Leigh Brackett? Peter S. Beagle? Michael Moorcock? Elizabeth Moon? Shakespeare? Tanith Lee? Andre Norton? Jack Williamson? Any translation of Beowulf, The Prose Edda, the Mahabharata or The Epic of Gilgamesh?


Kid, don't teach your Gramma to suck eggses, ya dig?

Oh, and yeah, I'm a High Priest of Tolkien, Gondor Chapter. We sacrifice copies of The Crystal Shard and any Drangonlance books via the Sacred Shredder on his birthday and on alternate St. Swithen's Days.

 

[FireLance]

Personally, I blame Shakespeare. I don't see gnomes mentioned in any of his works and the stereotype of elves that he created in A Midsummer Night's Dream inspired later authors to ascribe all kinds of uber-powers to them that would seriously inflate the racial Level Adjustment of the race in any decent role-playing game.

Actually, when I think about it, I blame Homer for not mentioning gnomes in the Iliad and the Odyssey, too.

No, wait. I think the blame for everything wrong with modern fantasy can be placed solely on the head of Ung the caveman, who explained that the evil spirits who killed his friend shot arrows "like Olf, from other tribe". If he had mentioned Nom instead, things could have been so different.

 

[Agamemnon]

Just a couple of minor points.

1) Tolkien was not a "scholar of literature", he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon. He was a man interested not necessarily in books, but in the English language and mythology entwined to it.

2) Linking The Lord of the Rings into any kind of military strategy is a leap of logic too extreme for my liking, and certainly not one the author intended. He does, after all, state his case very clearly in the prologue, saying the book is not metaphorical, allegorical or topical, even going as far as to say he detests allegory.

The book and its themes are applicable to real-life phenomena, but are not inspired by or intrisincally linked to them.

3) I have read Shakespeare, Dracula, Frankenstein, Guy Gavriel Kay's savagely beautiful Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, parts of Iliad and far too many books on mythology. Calling people such as myself ignorant because we don't choose to loathe JRRT for various nonsensical reasons is folly beyond mortal ken.

 

[Celtavian]

re

It's me again the 16 year old target of tolkien fanboy hate. He did make gnomes suck by not including them so people over look them a so comical because of the whole lawn ornement thing. I also have read fafhrd and grey mouser and I have no problem with that its just with tolkien as you can see people worship him as a god and his word is law. So when someone challenges this they call me a troll and I may be a troll but I am a troll with a message expand your herizons Tolkien fanboys read Conan, Dracula, Frankenstein or anything by H.P. Lovecraft and step out of your world and into a new like the realms of horror explored in many of the books I mentioned.

Are you really this dense? I am a diehard Tolkien fan boy as just about anybody that has seen me post on Tolkien topics will attest to. Yet, I still manage to read other authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, George R.R. Martin, Thomas Mallory and many other authors you don't even mention. I still like Tolkien best after reading all these other authors.

Tolkien is numero uno. He may not have invented fantasy. He may have robbed all his concepts from previous works of literature and poetry. He may write in a droll and descriptive manner that others don't like. He is still the KING OF FANTASY. His works continue to sell better than other fantasy works. They are classics that have withstood the test of time and outlived the life of the author. They inspire future generations of authors not only to create similar works, but dissimilar works based on their own imaginings of an exciting fantasy world.

Tolkien is from an objective standpoint perhaps the greatest fantasy author of all time. His magnum opus inspired the greatest fantasy movie of all time. They popularized fantasy when it was not much more than a collection of pulp novels, fairy tales, and European myths. Very few people have influenced the fantasy genre as much as Tolkien. His works will continue to be read by a large audience when a sixteen year old like yourself is ninety (if you even reach that ripe old age).

 

[Scarbonac]

His magnum opus inspired the greatest fantasy movie of all time.

Hawk The Slayer?

 

[Thotas]

As has been mentioned already, Gygax and pals stole stuff from everything they'd read, and they read a lot more than Tolkien. The myth that D&D began as a straight D&D lift came from people who'd only read Tolkien so they didn't know any better. Sadly, the power of suggestion being what it is, many people who should know better have bought into that ... nodding their heads and saying "yep" when they see a Tolkienesque element.

Others here have mentioned that the magic comes from Vance, and that Ioun stones do, too. Hmm, didn't know about the stones. Never been able to finish reading anything by Jack Vance, so I don't start anymore. My favorite example of how someone other than JRRT should have been able to sue Gary into poverty is Poul Anderson's "Three Hearts and Three Lions", which has characters that are clearly the original Paladin, Nixie, Gnome (called a "Hill Dwarf", but the big nose and foresty dwellings are no coincidence) and Troll. When I read the novel, my one bit of confusion was why the Swanmay wasn't stolen too ... a month later, the 1e MM-2 came out, there she was. Anderson is also the only place I've seen the word "drow" in a source prior to D&D, in a book called "The Broken Sword".

Exposition about Law vs. Chaos is, of course, the influence of Moorcock. Everyone knows that.

The 1e DMG has a section that lists Vance, Anderson, Moorcock, Howard, and several others as it's sources. The creators of the game never claimed to have come up with themselves, and they never claimed to use a single source. And they told you to go ahead and change all the stuff you didn't like, whether it was the stuff they stole or not.

As for the origin of the Tolkien orc ... he surely knew about the orcneas of Beowulf, but I've always been a bit suspicious of another source. There was a tribe in Ireland of old called the Orcs, and JRRT, an englishman who was surely exposed to certain stereotypical ideas about the Irish, portrays the orcs as a bunch of lazy, stupid drunks who are always ready for a fight. And if my suspicions are right, that makes me 1/4 orc.

 

[skinnydwarf]

Yes, it's a troll. Everyone else knows that Tolkien practically created modern fantasy.

I wouldn't go that far, but I agree, the post is almost definetly a trolling post. I like the part where he says Tolkien made halflings crybabies. Since halflings did not exist before Tolkien invented them, I don't think it is possible he could have ruined them. However, the fact that many fantasy worlds are populated by dwarves, elves, etc. is mostly due to Tolkien, although he did not invent *those* creatures.

Why don't I agree Tolkien invented modern fantasy? Because modern fantasy existed before Tolkien. Howard, Leiber, Vance and a host of others were writing great fantasy before Tolkien came along. Tolkien set a lot of the stereotypes that followed, but he hardly invented the field.

This becomes more apparent when you see that so little fantasy being written today (outside of game-related fantasy) holds to these stereotypes. How many fantasy books do you see now with a Tolkienesque world (again, not counting game-fantasy)? Not as many as there used to be right after LoTR was published.

However I think Tolkien did strike a blow to modern fantasy in one way, though it was not his fault. The damned trilogy/series that publishers are hooked on. Sometimes I just want to read a whole story in one book- why do they all have to be trilogies or series?! Oh yeah, profit.

 

[Dinkeldog]

Hawk The Slayer?

I love Hawk the Slayer, but I think he meant Ladyhawke.

 

[Dinkeldog]

So two things fall to me.

First, Tolkien did use "Gnomes" in the Lord of the Rings (although you may need to read the Silmarillion to really find out). Galadriel is one.

Second, here at EN World we pride ourselves on not referring to others as "moron", "deranged", or the like, even if we are sure we have categorical proof and are only pronouncing the Truth. Let's try to not throw sand around in Morrus' sandbox, okay?